What did change your mind?

As a child the first theory that I was taught in regard to evolution and the age of the earth was the fundamentalist version. Basically it was the belief that the earth is very young and that evolution was the theory promoted by Satan and his coworkers, including one Charles Darwin. I remember my sister writing a letter to a Memphis newspaper in support of the Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. I was perhaps 11 at the time and I didn't have the heart to tell her that I accepted evolution.

Even though I went to a conservative church every Sunday, I never was strongly attached to the idea of a young earth and never was fearful of evolution. From what I could tell, Charles Darwin was a serious and brilliant scientist. I did read a great deal of the creationist literature and even with my limited knowledge of science as a teenager, I was surprised at the poor quality of creationist writings. I continued with a career in science eventually getting a Ph.D. in chemistry and my original views on the poor quality of creationist writing have never changed.

I attended high school in Arkansas and evolution was never discussed at that time because of a state law that banned it. That law was eventually overturned by the courts. My knowledge of evolution came from reading outside of the classroom. My confidence in the old age of the earth comes not from biology but from a good understanding of the radiometric dating methods. It is not true, as many creationists claim, that these methods are without merit. There is more than enough merit to the methods to refute the creationist theory of a young earth. It is worth noting that many and perhaps most of the scientific types who post in this forum were originally brought up in an environment that was almost exclusively dominated by fundamentalist, young earth viewpoints.

[ July 03, 2003, 02:12 AM: Message edited by: Peter101 ]

 

I'm glad to see you are coming around on this natural selection thing. So, in a world without meat eating, why would a pre-flood omnivore have specialized adaptations for hunting down, killing, and eating other animals?</font>[/QUOTE] When precisely did I ignore the obvious? Species genetically capable of adapting to environmental changes survive. Those that are not, do not.

You are catching on. Organisms will evolve to exploit a niche if they can. But you stil have not shown that you can take general herbivores and evolve carnivores in a short period of time after the flood nor that you could do it by using on the loss of genetic information. </font>[/QUOTE] And secular science has never shown an instance where genetic information was ever gained by an organism through adaptation/mutation.

OTOH, the observed models involve either the loss or rearrangement of information to be the means of adaptation.

No but the variability within a 'kind' would be more than what is observed now.

Gorillas would likely be correctly classified as omnivores.</font>[/QUOTE] Really? By what rule of classification? How about camels? Why do they have large canines?

You know it is interesting that this came up. As I was watching my carnivorous dog eating watermelon the other evening, it struck me that I almost let you get away with some unprovable assumptions. We do not know what the antedeluvian environment was like nor the nutritional value of all the vegetation available then nor the type of teeth needed for whatever diet these animals might have had.

BTW, I read on a site that during WWII the zoo in London was forced by the meat shortage to develop an alternative diet for their big cats based on grains. If this is true then your strict uniformitarian limits are invalidated.

Notably, your side narrows the range of reasonable explainations to those consistent with current conditions when Creationists claim latitude then expand the range well outside of the uniformitarian box when needed to explain away your problems.

 

Wrong. Here's a good one.

http://www.nmsr.org/nylon.htm

A bacterium evolved the ability to metabolize nylon by a frame shift mutation. Because of gene duplication, most varieties of this bacterium lost no other enzymes at all. Other species than picked up the mutation as an addition by conjugation and other means. Again, most of them retained all the other enzymes.

From where did the information for that enzyme come?

If this is not new information, then by definition, information is not required for evolution.

Which is it?

That would, I guess, be consistent with the observation that evolution rarely produces anything new. It just recruits existing features to new uses.

Hence, to make a land animal, evolution didn't start over, but just reworked fins. Is that new information? If not, evolution has no need of information.

 

Wrong. Here's a good one.

http://www.nmsr.org/nylon.htm </font>[/QUOTE] Wrong. If you had read both arguments, theirs and AiG's, you could not honestly say this issue has been concluded by any stretch.

If you like, I can critique the language used in response to AiG's answer. The bottom line of the verbose response is "they may be wrong and I believe they are." Once again, the most powerful "proof" in the response is not the evidence but the biased interpretation of the evidence. The author would appear much more credible if they weren't so incredibly pompous as to declare their interpretative conclusions 'fact' when they most decidedly are not fact.

That would, I guess, be consistent with the observation that evolution rarely produces anything new. It just recruits existing features to new uses.

Hence, to make a land animal, evolution didn't start over, but just reworked fins. Is that new information? If not, evolution has no need of information. </font>[/QUOTE]Even if the strained interpretation you cited as proof were correct, there is an incredible span between supposing that bacteria can start to metabolize a new food source and turning a fin into a leg.

 

I believe in the inerrancy of scripture, and I think that an old earth fits just fine within the framework of the Genesis creation account.There is absolutely no compelling theological reason for me to limit God to a literal six day creation, and there is far too much evidence from numerous fields of scientific endeavor which suggest that the earth is extremely old.What changed my opinion was reading athiest message boards where so called "young earth scientists" get creamed on a regular basis by real scientists.I believe any objective person is forced to conclude that the earth is extremely old when confronted with all of the evidence.Oh yes, Hugh Ross was also very helpful. Then again he is also a legitimate scientist.

 

Here:

http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20030327/01

Article that talks about how new metabolic pathways are created in species (Gulf toadfish and Rainbow trout here) when genes are duplicated and then diverge. The resulting metabolic pathways are all useful and are new except for the original. New information. There are many such examples where completely new pathways develop after a duplication. See for example the thread last month on chlorophyll. http://www.baptistboard.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=36;t=000244 You can assert all you want that this is not new information but it is new fuctions and new pathways and is evolution. And that is the bottom line.

And if you want to persist in asserting that pre-flood herbivores turned into specialized hunters after the flood, then there is a trainload of new "information" needed.

What does that mean? You have either 2 or 7 individuals getting of the ark. You have an extreme bottleneck even if all these animals survive. There is essentially NO diversity or variability. How do you think there is enough "information" in TWO individuals to get the kind of rapid evolution and speciation you require after the flood?

Not so fast. You cut open that watermelon yourself? Have you tried feeding you dog a strictly plant based diet? It is not a matter that these animals cannot survive on a plant based diet, it is that they are not equipped to do so in the wild. The lions may have been able to survive the war on a grain based diet. Do you have any studies of their changes in health during this time? And that is with an intelligently designed diet trying to get them the necessary nutrients and I would suspect it included all sorts of supplements. But do you think that lion, in the wild would be able to get these grains together and survive? No. With a human supervising the diet, they may be able to survive, but they could never do it on their own. They don't have the right equipment. To begin with they could not masticate that plant food (in your example I bet the grains were milled by a human and did not require the animal's teeth to do so) and their digestive system could not get adequate nutrition from the chunks of plant material. Try feeding your dog some cracked corn kernals and then look in its stool a few days later. You'll find cracked corn.

 

"These findings indicate toadfish GS gene duplication and diversification and confirm recent observations that the rainbow trout possesses at least four GS encoding genes with differing levels of tissue expression and different metabolic pathways."

This is a quote from your article. Please note the word "indicate". What is being said as well as what was said in Galatians article is that a genetic characteristic has been observed which was not observed before therefore it must have evolved. This obviously assumes facts not in evidence based on the bias of the observer.

One other thing stuck out. A related animal in Africa possesses a similar characteristic. The premise a creationist would work from is that these animals descended from a common ancestor and specialized to their remote environments. The majority of one group retained the characteristic while only a small minority of the other group did. This variance has now been discovered. I did not read whether this is now characteristic of the population or still a sub-group but neither presents a significant problem to my supposition.

What is lacking from my proposal as well as yours is observed proof. Neither of us can study the population (not a sample) of these toads from 30, 50, 100, or 4000 years ago. All you have here is an observation and an explaination of it.

With regard to the trout, it is just as reasonable if not more so to suppose that a common ancestor possessed all of the characteristics that have since diverged into 4 groups as to assume that information has been gained from a common ancestor. Again, what we lack is proof from previous populations (or even significant samples) that would enable us to determine which is closer to the truth.

I did not notice in the article where it said that a sample had been observed acquiring this change nor where offspring were observed with greater genetic info than their parents. Also lacking from all of the posted articles are laboratory recreations of the supposed mechanism. Of course even if such were produced, it would simply prove that something could occur- and that by design no less- not that it did.

 

Not so fast. You cut open that watermelon yourself? Have you tried feeding you dog a strictly plant based diet? It is not a matter that these animals cannot survive on a plant based diet, it is that they are not equipped to do so in the wild.</font>[/QUOTE]You demonstrate my point very well. They can survive on a plant based diet and therefore it is within the realm of possibility that their ancestors did so in the wild.

 

Absolutely not!

They were only able to survive because a human was able to do things for them that they would be unable to do for themselves in the wild. You get a human to harvest and mill the grain and it doesn't matter that they are not equipped to gather plant material nor to chew it into suitably sized pieces for digestion. They are unable in the wild to get the nutritional supplements needed to survive on a diet so far from what their bodies are optimized for.

Did these animals thrive on this diet? Highly unlikely or else you would be telling me that zoos the world over still use the diet. A plant based diet is cheaper by a long shot over meat. And they went back to meat as soon as it was available again, no? If the animals had thrived on a grain diet it would have been an incredibly dumb business decision to go back to meat and its higher cost!

Please try the corn experiment. Your dog will not digest the least amount of kernal corn. And that is ignoring that your dog isn't that well equipped to go pull the corn off the stalks, get the shucks off, and get the kernals off the cob. A human can do all tha for him and he still cannot digest the corn kernals and he cannot chew the kernals to something he might have some hope of getting some value from despite his short little digestive track.

 

You are demanding an impossible level of proof. Of course we do not have DNA from animals hundreds of years ago (Very shrewd of you BTW to posit that the evolution of the various species would have been in the last hundreds of years or few thousand years by subtly naming only years in those ranges. I like that. Sometimes it is better to be subtle than to always hit people over the head.) or millions of years ago.

We can disagree about the interpretation of the data. But what we do have a specific pathway found in a large group of organisms. When we look at specific individuals, some of these have versions of a gene involved in the original pathway that has been duplicated and evolved to be useful in a new pathway. That is an increase in what you define as "information."

Furthermore, you posit that "these animals descended from a common ancestor and specialized to their remote environments. The majority of one group retained the characteristic while only a small minority of the other group did." The details that catch you up are that if the original "kind" had these various pathways and the "information" for some of them had been lost, then the original genes would still be found in the modern animals as non-functioning pseudogenes. Your proof would be to find these remains of the original genes. Otherwise, the evolutionary explanation fits the evidence better. It is possible that some would be lost by deletion type mutations, but it is unlikely that a significant fraction would be lost not only by a deletion but also by the dletion of exactly that one gene length DNA. Otherwise, whatever mutation disabled the pathway would leave evidence in the genes. This is a key point, if cannot provide the leftovers then your interpretation falls short of the mainstream interpretation in fitting the evidence. Your theory makes predictions and it is time to spell out those predictions and demand evidence for this is what happens in other sciences including evolution.

It is far less likely to observe new pathways in higher animals in the lab because of the longer generation time. But we have seen new pathways created in microbes in the lab. But you always dismiss these. I understand. You have to.

I'm sticking to my premise that (1) the flood would have been a great bottleneck, preventing enough diversity in the gene pool to even allow for the degree of speciation you need especially in the time that you need and (2) that getting specialized hunters from pre-flood plant eaters would require much new "information" to be generated in a short time.

 

Now, that you have realized this of your position. Will you acknowledge that you require the same of creationists? Creationists, like evolutionists, propose ideas and possibilities fitting within their accepted paradigm... most of which cannot be proven with absolute certainty. Evolutionists say that things observed in nature must have a naturalistic explaination. Creationists say that the Bible is God-breathed, literal, and true. Neither premise can be validated by direct observation requiring faith in a worldview that governs interpretation.

If I simply said that God created it exactly like it is in six literal days, I have provided a means for creation and a time period. Your objections to my time period necessarily call into question the intelligence and ability of the "Means". Your demand for proof would be the existence and character of God... an impossible task by purely naturalistic means.

 

On the contrary, Galatians link cites the pre-existence of inert DNA that is very similar to the modified DNA. Your citation does not go into that much detail.

However, we are still talking about unproven rules and a limited time frame of experimentation. We do not possess previous generations of DNA and have no idea what happens to unused "pseudo-genes" over longer periods of time.

 

Of course. We live today and we are both forced to make due with what evidence we can gather from the world around us and from dead things in the ground. Each proposal makes some predictions about what kind of evidence will be found and each makes different explanations of the evidenece we have. And on the whole, an old earth and evolution fit the evidence the best. I find it key that the predictions of a young earth be presented and contrasted with those of evolution and that we look at how the evidence fits those predictions. In this case, I propose that the loss of "information" from an original "kind" would leave evidence in the form of pseudogenes in the genones of modern animals that would reveal the lost pathways that led to speciation from the "kinds."

 

No, it is not a smoking gun. But it is one piece of straw on a big hay pile of evidence. Gene duplication and mutation of one of the copies is proposed as a way to add new "information" to the genome and new pathways to the organism. This is a small bit of evidence of that happening with a particular gene. Your explanation makes predictions which have not been shown to be true.

We can look at species today and get a pretty good idea of the rates of mutation. From this you can statistically infer the effect of time. So we can have a pretty good idea. If you want to propose higher mutation rates in the last few thousand years, it is up to you to provide the mechanism and evidence since it will be your claim. Maybe evidence of significantly higher cancer rates. A high enough mutation rate to obliterate the leftovers would also be expected to have the same effect on the genes you want to keep and you would be left without an organism.

 

Let me see if I can give an example of what I mean by predictions based on what we are talking about. Correct me, please, if I mess up an assumption from your side of things.

From a creationist point of view, there can never be new "information" created in the genome. So in the original "kind" all four of these pathways must have existed. Some of these pathways were lost through time as mutations damaged the part of the genome that gave rise to the necessary proteins. From this, I would extrapolate that you would still be able to find the genes that gave rise to the original four pathways in the various members of the group, but that in most of them the genes had been damaged to the point that the protein was no longer able to function. Further, I would expect that various members of the group would have different combinations of which pathway or pathways still worked as mutations happened in different lines of animals, provided that none of the pathways were critical to survival and would cause selection against if it were damaged. I would also expect that by looking at such information (it likely would require information from other genes and pathways also) you could reconstruct the evolutionary pathway from the original "kinds" to the present species.

So, this gives things creationists could research to present evidence for their side. Use your point of view to come up with predictions that differ from those of evolutionists and that explain the data better. In this case a few things come to mind. Show that the pathways that exist in the various modern animals are actually one of the four originals. Show that the genomes of the existing animals have the leftovers for making the other proteins of the other pathways, but in a damaged state. Use the genomes of the these animals and the genomes of other animals to show that this group is unique (is a "kind") and unrelated to other groups ("kinds"). For this you might could find various proteins from the original "kind" by looking at the descendants alive today and show that members of other "kinds" neither have these proteins nor genes closely related enough that they could make these proteins through some series of mutations.